Morbid Symptoms

This essay reviews Phil Neel’s Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict, Jeff Sharlet’s The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, and Noah Schwartz’s On Target: Gun Culture, Storytelling, and the NRA. Hinterland is a Marxist mapping of the terrain of contemporary class struggle that registers deindustrialization’s combined and uneven integration of apparently fringe areas into capitalism. The Undertow is a best-selling journalistic sojourn in Trump country, exploring how the body politic has been torn apart and the prospects for a genuine liberal democracy drowned in the process. On Target is an ethnographic account of the NRA’s mass base. Each book addresses key dimensions of the current political landscape in the United States. By examining them through the lens of the potential resurgence of fascism, this review essay argues that cultural explanations of the radical right are weaker than materialist ones grounded in critical understandings of capitalist political economy.